The War Party's Theologian

President Bush used his European trip to return to a theme that has
suffered some hits lately: moral clarity. "If we ignore this
threat," he told the German Bundestag in Berlin, referring to al
Qaeda's terrorists and their sponsors, "we invite certain blackmail
and place millions of our citizens in grave danger."

It is not simply a matter of opposing a hostile force, Mr. Bush
argued, but of defending the moral foundations of civilization
itself. "Others killed in the name of racial purity," he delicately
reminded his German audience. "These enemies kill in the name of a
false religious purity." The genocidal impulse is the same.

Many Europeans, of course, decry the president's antiterrorist
policy as "cowboy" diplomacy, a gross oversimplification of
international politics. And so do at least a few American
intellectuals--Noam Chomsky among them. But they are all dreaming
of an easy peace, and we've been down that road before. Mr. Bush's
World War II reference, in fact, is powerfully confirmed by reading
"An End to Illusions," a 1940 essay published in the Nation
magazine just as the German army was ripping through Europe.

Written by Reinhold Niebuhr, the eminent American theologian, it
rocked the liberal establishment of its time. Niebuhr was one of
them: a socialist, a public intellectual, a darling of the
political left. But he was no longer willing to toe the Socialist
Party line, which held that the war was merely a clash of
imperalisms.

As a liberal Protestant, Niebuhr was no uncritical apologist for
American democracy, much less its foreign policy. And with his
notoriously agonized belief in the complexities of the human
condition, he admitted that there may not be much difference
between nations at war. Yet the differences that remain, he felt,
are fatefully important.

"The Socialists are right, of course, in insisting that the
civilization which we are called to defend is full of capitalistic
and imperialistic injustice," he wrote. "But it is still a
civilization." Impaired by their utopian ideals, the detractors, he
argued, could not distinguish between German war aims and Western
resistance. Remarkably, they failed to see the moral gulf
separating a genocidal force and a liberal democracy.

Niebuhr owed his own clarity of vision to a deep belief in the
existence of evil. By the 1930s, the concept had fallen out of
favor, even among theologians. Most thought of it in abstract
terms. But Niebuhr restored some of its biblical meaning: Evil
could possess individuals, even entire governments.
Bad politics results, he believed, from ignoring this demonstrable
fact about human nature. The rationale for endless diplomacy,
Niebuhr observed, is that the "moral force" of the international
community can bend the will of tyrants. Nonsense, he concluded: "It
fails to explain just how this moral force is to be effective
against tanks, flame-throwers, and bombing planes." Sometimes war
is necessary.

Niebuhr's "Christian realism" insisted that, even in a world
full of sin, civilized nations must strive for justice. In his day
that meant waging war on fascism with "ambiguous methods"--unsavory
alliances, deception, massive military strikes. It left little room
for idealists. "Let those who are revolted by such ambiguities,"
Niebuhr wrote, "have the decency and consistency to retire to the
monastery, where medieval perfectionists found their asylum."

In our day, Niebuhrian realism demands a fierce struggle against
Islamic terrorism and its sponsors. What other responsible choice
exists? Every reliable piece of intelligence confirms that our
enemies are seeking to wreak more havoc and destruction--even with
biological and nuclear weapons. The moment they have such weapons,
as President Bush put it, "no inner voice of reason, no hint of
conscience would prevent their use."

Niebuhr was horrified at the idea of meeting fascism with
pacifist hand-wringing. "This culture does not understand
historical reality clearly enough to deserve to survive," he wrote
angrily. "It has a right to survival only because the alternative
is too horrible to contemplate." Today's critics of a strong
military response may want to contemplate the horrible alternatives
that inaction may bring.

Joseph Loconte is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a
commentator for National Public Radio.